De l’influence de l’esclavage sur l’existence des personnes libres et industrieuses qui n’ont point

CHAP. 5: > On the influence of slavery on the existence of free and industrious persons who own no slaves.

The effects of servitude on the morals of masters and slaves are phenomena of great importance to observe. Before undertaking these observations, however, it is necessary to explain the effects the same cause produces on the physical organs and intellectual faculties of those men who, while living in a slave society, must practice some branch of industry to survive.

Slavery does not produce exactly the same effects on this latter class of men among the moderns as it produced among the peoples of antiquity. Two causes have brought about the differences we are about to observe in these effects. Among the ancients, one people almost always saw an enemy in another; if one thought of emigrating, it was only ever with arms in hand. Among the moderns, on the contrary, there may be enmity between two governments, or between a government and a nation; but between two nations, there can no longer be war. The only exceptions in this regard are among savages. An individual who understands the language of a foreign people can go and settle in its territory and practice his industry there: he may have to fear the vexations of the government, but he has none to dread from the population. There are today a great number of nations from whose midst domestic slavery has completely disappeared; so that, if a man who is neither a slave nor a master has to suffer from the existence of slavery, he can go and settle in a country where he will not have to experience the same kind of evils. Among the peoples of antiquity who are best known to us, men did not have this resource: a Roman who had only his arms for his entire fortune could not go and settle in a country where no slaves existed; and emigrations would have been difficult once the known world had been conquered.

A sentiment common to all men, whatever their class, is the horror of being despised; many people resign themselves to being ignored or unknown, but no one can resolve to be despised; even individuals born into slavery revolt at the manifestation of this sentiment. We have seen that one of the first effects of slavery is to degrade all occupations that require man to act upon things with the aim of increasing their utility; we have also seen that the contempt in which these occupations are held always spreads to the persons who engage in them. From this it follows that, in a country where slavery is established, a man who belongs neither to the master class nor the slave class is obliged either to remain idle, to be despised, or to take his industry elsewhere. The last option is the one generally taken by all men who have the means; at the Cape of Good Hope, as has been seen, even artisans practice their trade only through the hands of their slaves; in the United States, free workers disappear from all places where slaves exist; and the emigration of the former is proportional to the importation of the latter [66].

Besides the contempt attached to industrial occupations in countries exploited by slaves, there exists another cause of emigration that exercises a great influence: the difficulty of procuring constant and regular work. A free worker finds himself in competition, not with the slaves who practice the same industry as he, but with the masters to whom these slaves belong and who live off the income they derive from renting them out. These competitors, who often enjoy very extensive authority, find among their equals a support that a simple worker, judged contemptible in advance, would seek in vain from them. It is possible, however, that men who have no other means of existence than their labor may not have the means to go and establish themselves elsewhere: they are then placed between the shame attached to begging and the contempt that is inseparable from industrial occupations; the first course is often the one they prefer, because in the eyes of a master, a beggar is above a slave. If free men sometimes consent to work, it is only insofar as the high wage compensates for the contempt attached to the labor, and even then a free worker buys slaves or disappears as soon as he has made some savings [67]. It is even difficult for a middle class to form in the country; for when a man has only a small property, he hastens to sell it to go and settle elsewhere [68].

Nowhere has domestic slavery produced more remarkable and more terrible effects on the men who belong neither to the master class nor the slave class than in the Roman republic.

It appears that, from the beginning of the Roman republic, the population was divided into two classes: to the first, which formed the aristocracy, were exclusively devolved the civil, military, and sacerdotal functions; to the second were devolved the care of herds, the cultivation of lands, the arts, and commerce [69]. The Romans could not have possessed a great number of slaves at that time; it was therefore necessary that industry be practiced by free hands. Things changed as slaves became more numerous; the masters first employed them in the cultivation of the lands; and, from that moment, free cultivators began to disappear from the countryside. Toward the end of the republic, the soil of Italy was exploited only by slaves of all nations; and, as one of the effects of slavery is to reduce the intelligence of the enslaved population to the smallest possible dimensions, agriculture had to be reduced to the simplest and easiest operations. The fields were therefore converted into pastures, and an intelligent and free population was replaced by herds, and by captives whom their qualities as shepherds and slaves made doubly stupid.

The free inhabitants of the countryside had been able to take refuge in Rome or in some other cities when the cultivation of lands and the care of herds were given over to slaves; but there was no longer any possible refuge when the aristocracy began to have the arts and commerce practiced for its profit by the hands of its slaves. There were then no assured means of existence except for the masters and for the men who belonged to them; the numerous class of the population, designated by the name proletarian, had to live by means of public distributions, the pillage it carried out in wartime, the sums the great distributed to it to buy its suffrage, the loans it took out and never had the means to repay, or else by some industry practiced clandestinely. The number of families who found themselves in this necessity became immense; in the census that took place around the year 278 from the founding of Rome, the number of citizens, says one historian, amounted to 110,000 men, not counting children, servants, merchants, artisans, and an infinity of other common people who earned their living by the labor of their hands, and who were not permitted to trade publicly, nor to practice any craft. It was difficult to relieve so many people, who amounted to three times as many as the citizens themselves [70].

The history of Rome offers phenomena not found in the history of any other people: it is a series of seditions and wars caused by the harshness of creditors and by a multitude of insolvent debtors. One has difficulty at first conceiving how men destitute of all resources, who considered labor degrading, and who were not permitted, moreover, to engage in commerce or industry, found money to borrow, and how a debtor, mistreated by his creditor, could excite such sympathy that he needed only to show himself to cause an insurrection. But this is easily explained: any insolvent debtor could be reduced to slavery, and not only he, but his children as well [71]; the great, who exclusively possessed wealth, were interested in capturing the suffrages of the multitude through loans or gifts; the sight of an abused debtor reminded the mass of the population that it no longer belonged to itself, and that the men to whom it had sold itself by borrowing could exercise, over most of the individuals of which it was composed, cruelties similar to those whose marks were shown to it.

The men who have constituted themselves the defenders of the most numerous part of the population have been, in all times, the object of so many accusations on the part of the oppressors, that we are quite naturally disposed to brand their reproaches and their complaints with the name of declamations. It would not be impossible, therefore, that some readers might accuse of exaggeration the speech that Plutarch puts in the mouth of Tiberius Gracchus, when he has him say:

“The wild beasts in Italy at least have their lairs, their dens, their caves where they can retreat; but the men who fight and die to defend it possess nothing there but the air and the light, and are forced to wander here and there with their wives and children, without a place to stay and without a house in which to lodge [72].”

But when one sees the senators themselves say in the middle of the senate that there are two peoples in Rome, one governed by indigence and baseness, the other by abundance and pride [73]; when one sees Caesar repopulate Corinth, Carthage, and several other cities with Romans who had no refuge, and send as many as 80,000 of them overseas at one time [74], it is difficult not to believe in the excessive misery to which the multiplicity of slaves had reduced the part of the population that did not belong to the master class [75].

Thus, slavery had, among the Romans, the effect it has had in the colonies formed by Europeans in America: it degraded, in the eyes of the free population, all useful labors, and it made the free men who cultivated the countryside disappear from the places where it was introduced. Its effect, relative to the inhabitants of the cities, was to render them incapable of practicing any kind of industry, and to prevent them from developing their intellectual faculties on the means that could have allowed them to live without harming anyone. It left them the power to exercise their physical and intellectual faculties only in the art of enslaving or destroying peoples, that is to say, in the art of multiplying the number of slaves, thus increasing the pride and power of the aristocracy, and consequently augmenting their own misery.

It will be better understood how slavery leaves no honorable means of existence for free men who need to practice their industry, once I have explained the effects it produces on morals and on wealth.